Poetry
"Philosophy should be written only as one would write poetry."
- Wittgenstein
Poetry
By Marianne Moore
I too dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine.
[Click here for extended version]
“Does not philosophy carry us to a point at which there is nothing left except the imagination?”
-- Wallace Stevens
"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there."
- W.C. Williams,
from Asphodel That Greeny Flower
"If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown."
- from Elizabeth Bishop, "At the Fishhouses"
"Say it! No ideas but in things"
- W.C. Williams
A Coat
By W.B. Yeats
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
"What of the answers
I must find questions for?"
-Bob Kaufman, from Jail Poems
"A poem should not mean
But be."
- Archibald MacLeish, from Ars Poetica
"It is a queer thing that so few reviewers seem to realize that one writes poetry because one must. . . . It is quite possible to have a feeling about the world which creates a need that nothing satisfies except poetry and this has nothing to do with other poets or with anything else."
- Wallace Stevens
"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
- Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself
"Anything is good material for poetry. Anything." - W.C. Williams
"nor till the poets among us can be 'literalists of the imagination' . . . shall we have it"
- Marianne Moore, from Poetry
"In the blue pharmacy the pharmacist
had hung an empty wasps' nest from a shelf: small, exquisite, clean matte white,
and hard as stucco. I admired it so much he gave it to me.
Then---my ship's whistle blew. I couldn't stay. Back on board, a fellow-passenger, Mr. Swan, Dutch, the retiring head of Philips Electric, really a very nice old man, who wanted to see the Amazon before he died, asked, 'What's that ugly thing?'"
- Elizabeth Bishop, from Santarém
"You oceans that have been calm within me!
how I feel you, fathomless, stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms."
- Walt Whitman, from Starting from Paumanok
A Cave Allegory
(forthcoming in Philosophy & Literature)
A retelling of Plato's famous allegory of the cave.
Click here to read.
Tractatus pedagogico-philosophicus
Not really a poem—but a cute pedagogical tool that helps students get "the big picture" of the Tractatus.
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Doctor of the Soul
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Pastoral
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Consciousness Studies
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The Dream That Lingered Past Dawn
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The Life of the Sign
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What is a Poem?
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Katabasis
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Hymn to a Life-Loving God
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Soft Pavement
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Portrait of Inner Space
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The Fly
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Candy Moon
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Meditation on Your Painterly Mind
Click here to read.
Scene From Our Life
Click here to read.
Duluthian Sanctuary of Dust
Click here to read.
Die Urpflanze
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Willow River Falls
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Minnesota Spring
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A Rambunctious Poetic Individualism
Click here to read.
Minnesota Beach Day
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I Fell in Love Again
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You Excite Me
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Child Again
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America
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On Lough Leane
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Death is the End
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On the Raised Platform
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At the Mexican Art Museum
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Detroit
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Before Landing
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Saturday Morning
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Heaven is a Sandwich
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At Walden Café
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Car Fire
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Every Thing Fits Into Itself
Click here to read.
Thought
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Language
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This Strange Eventful History
Click here to read.
Out of the Fur Light
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Downtwn Chicago - Frm 15 Stories Up
Click here to read.
Under the Sawdust
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The Sublime of Ink Blots
Click here to read.
On Holiday
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Sunglasses
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Conversation Between a Pear and a Peignoir
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What I learned from the philosophers of language
Click here to read.
Trust Your Gut
Click here to read.
Ode to a Kitchen Cloth
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Ways With Words
Click here to read.
To Be Understood
Click here to read.
The Problem of Evil
Click here to read.
Mythology
Click here to read.
Idea of Home
Click here to read.
4 AM
Click here to read.
Life in Letters
Click here to read.
Ontogenesis of Flames
Click here to read.
Sermon on Mt. Johnston
Click here to read.
If You Meet the Buddha on the Road
Click here to read.
In the Back Woods
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Summer Book Report
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Protest is Useless
Click here to read.
Courage of Tiny Strangers
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Sleepless
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Happy Fourth
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Mystery Enumerations
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At the Bookstore
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Apologia
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Analysis
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AI Reflections
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Sifting Through The Catalogue
Click here to read.
Daydream
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Snow Man of Our Climate
Click here to read.
Persuasion
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National Gallery, Dublin
Click here to read.
How To
Click here to read.
To Say This Is Just
Click here to read.
Correspondences
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Life of Artistry
Click here to read.
Modernisms
Click here to read.
Meteorology for Robins
Click here to read.
Birthday Poem
Click here to read.
River of Time
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Invitation
Click here to read.
Sensory Scales
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A Poem Requires
Click here to read.
I Almost Forgot
Click here to read.
An Ode to Summer
Click here to read.
Foundation
Click here to read.
Mother & Ducklings
Click here to read.
Theories of Desire
Click here to read.
Rough Ground
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Genius
Click here to read.
Being Most Oneself
Click here to read.
Q&A
Click here to read.
Acquiescence
Click here to read.
Interpretation
Click here to read.
Geometry of Shadows
Click here to read.
Most of All
Click here to read.
Crossing
Click here to read.
Day to Day
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Reproduction & Birth in Beauty
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Call & Response
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What is the Result of Philosophical Therapy?
Click here to read.
Found Poem
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Over There
Click here to read.
Love
Click here to read.
Homemaking
Click here to read.
Ugliness
Click here to read.
The Times
Click here to read.
Toes
Click here to read.
Patriarch, Dishwasher
Click here to read.
Coming of Age
Click here to read.
When They Find Our Remains
Click here to read.
Adjunct Life
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